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Trump is Toast: The shoe just dropped regarding his ties to Russia
Last edited Mon Oct 31, 2016, 07:15 PM - Edit history (2)
Edit:
David Corn just brought the "full shoe rack" contra Trump. Credit to http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=2565294
When you finish reading that post you can come back to mine. Or not. I'm a happy man either way.
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FBI is investigating Manafort. That's great news for Hillary but not a kill shot to Trump's campaign. Well, maybe it will be. Let's look into the story further. The quote from NBC first.
The FBI has been conducting a preliminary inquiry into Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort's foreign business connections, law enforcement and intelligence sources told NBC News Monday.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi-making-inquiry-ex-trump-campaign-manager-s-foreign-ties-n675881
Yesterday Harry Reid sent his letter to Comey which alleged that Comey knew of Trump and Putin's collaboration. I thought that it was very likely that the Russian story would drop today. And it did.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=2562258
My take is that there's been a very interesting dance that has taken place today. Comey is looking for friends, and not finding many. Comey got himself into an impossible situation, legally, ethically and politically. And the pressure was ratcheted up on him massively today.
Here's what I think occurred. Reid sends the letter to Comey, signaling to partisans that it's time to move. The next day it is revealed that Comey didn't want to disclose Russian meddling "for fear it would influence the election." At that moment, Comey is toast if the president wants him to be. The rationale for disclosing the Weiner emails is no longer valid. He arguably has violated the Hatch act, along with his ethical obligations that govern FBI directors. Former prosecutors including Alberto Gonzales are howling. (That's a bad day if Alberto is on your jock about ethics.)
However, Obama being the cool customer he always is, extended an olive branch today. They didn't jump on the anti-Comey bandwagon. They took no position on his Weiner letter. People on the left then freaked out. But I think that what really happened is that Obama signaled to Comey that we can still be buddies, but get the hell out of the way, because the Russian investigation is going to be revealed. And then the shoe dropped.
Look for steady drips of information coming against Trump in the next 48 hours. (A la the server article in Slate)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12512564898
Why do I say that Trump is toast? Because the most exciting part of the NBC story is that it references, "Law enforcement and intelligence sources told NBC News Monday." Multiple sources in multiple agencies is GREAT. And guess what "intelligence sources" means? CIA.
By the way, that "bombshell" Brian Ross story is old. I get excited for a microsecond every time I read the headline.
48 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Soon, the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers began chasing the story. (They are still pursuing it.) Lichtblau met with a Washington representative of Alfa Bank on Sept. 21, and the bank denied having any connection to Trump. (Lichtblau told me that Times policy prevents him from commenting on his reporting.)
The Times hadn’t yet been in touch with the Trump campaign—Lichtblau spoke with the campaign a week later—but shortly after it reached out to Alfa, the Trump domain name in question seemed to suddenly stop working. When the scientists looked up the host, the DNS server returned a “fail” message, evidence that it no longer functioned. Or as it is technically diagnosed, it had SERVFAILed. (On the timeline above, this is the moment at the end of the chronology when the traffic abruptly spikes, as servers frantically attempt to resend rejected messages.) The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Nicholas Weaver told me the Trump domain was “very sloppily removed.” Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”
From:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_server_registered_to_the_trump_organization_communicating_with_russia.html
Four days later, on September 27, the Trump organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route. When a new host name is created, the first communication with it is never random. To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server. “That party had to have some kind of outbound message through sms, phone, or some non-internet channel they used to communicate [the new configuration],” Paul Vixie told me. The first attempt to look up the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. “If this was a public server, we would have seen other traces,” Vixie says. “The only look-ups came from this particular source.”
According to Vixie and others, the new host name may have represented an attempt to establish a new channel of communication. But media inquiries into the nature of Trump’s relationship with Alfa Bank, which suggested that their communications were being monitored, may have deterred the parties from using it. Soon after the New York Times began to ask questions, the traffic between the servers stopped cold.
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